09/30/2025
September 2025 – Health Advocate Insights
September, 2025
Health Advocate Insights
Welcome back to Health Advocate Insights, the Social Mission Alliance’s monthly newsletter tracking and making sense of what is shifting in health professional training and workforce policy and advocacy. We are here to follow the latest administrative shifts, policy changes, and the ways people are organizing in response, together.
This newsletter is created as a tool for collective orientation, not to add to the overwhelm, but to help steady us in the flood of information and lift up what’s emerging. Each month, we highlight a handful of key developments and how all of us, whether we are students, health care providers, educators, administrators, or organizers, can push for health workforce diversity and social accountability in health professional training programs.
Every issue will give you three things: a clearer sense of what is moving, a spark of energy from seeing how others are pressing forward, and at least one way you can get engaged and act.
In this edition is a round-up of summer’s biggest policy updates, resources for deeper learning, and invitations to take action wherever you are, including registering for our first fall webinar on September 30.
The "Big Beautiful Bill" is Anything But...
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On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill into law. This bill strips insurance coverage from millions, leaves communities with fewer providers, and slams the door on the next generation of diverse health professionals. The bill extends 2017 tax cuts and makes historic cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. For students and trainees, it eliminates some types of loans, ends repayment plans for some borrowers, and creates new caps on federal borrowing for graduate programs. Learn more and act: |
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The Growing Wave of DEI Rollbacks
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Across the nation, anti-DEI measures are dismantling efforts to address health inequities and strengthen a diverse health workforce. In August, the Supreme Court cancelled $783 million in NIH grants tied to DEI. In September, the Education Department announced that they would move to end grant funding for minority-serving institutions; however, advocates report that the department does not have the authority to do so. Moreover, recent administrative guidance aimed at curbing diversity and inclusion is stoking fear across education, healthcare, and local government, ignoring repeated evidence that links these efforts to better health outcomes. Learn more and act: |
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Image by freepik
Take Action Now
Curious about what you can do? Here are opportunities to take action from wherever you are.
Disrupt myths about anti-DEI and transphobic executive orders using this tool from the Health Equity Community Collaborative. Check out their communications training to learn how to share messaging amidst a rapidly shifting landscape.
From Evidence to Power: Organizing for Public Health with Jon Shaffer, PhD – Sociologist–organizer Jon Shaffer, PhD explains why organizing—not just evidence—wins concrete, local public-health protections, and how Defend Public Health (DPH) is training state teams to do exactly that.
The Baltimore Redevelopment Action Coalition for Empowerment (BRACE) will Unveil the Middle East Baltimore Memory Mural – The Middle East Baltimore Memory Mural honors the Middle East neighborhood and the collective power of residents who have fought to preserve their community amid displacement and gentrification. BRACE is working to raise $3,000 by October 11 to cover the mural’s completion, a community celebration of its unveiling, and the re-launch of our online archive.
Join us for the fall relaunch of our For Us All Campaign on October 14th – Whether it’s your first time hearing about the campaign or you’ve been a part of this work since the beginning, we want you to be a part of this webinar! Join us to learn more about the campaign, recent updates, and ways you can join the fight for transformative health justice through social accountability within health professions training institutions.
Apply for Health in Partnership’s Power-building Partnerships for Health Cohort –Power-building Partnerships for Health (PPH) is a 10-month program for local health departments and community power-building organizations to take collective inside/outside action toward health equity and racial justice. Apply by October 27, 2025.
What We're Reading & Watching
- Anti-DEI Laws Have Passed at a Furious Pace This Year. Here’s What They Do (Source: The Chronical of Higher Education)
- Narrative Strategies for Belonging: Resources on Narrative, Pluralism, and Transformative Change (Source: Othering & Belonging Institute)
- ChangeLab Solutions Act for Public Health Briefings: Federal Actions & DEIA Initiatives (Source: Youtube)
- When Universities Become Informants (Source: The Chronical of Higher Education)
- The fate of the CDC hinges on this new, three-page table (Source: Substack)
- On Not Surrendering in Advance (Or At Any Point Thereafter) (Source: Meditations in an Emergency)
- Don’t Let States Interfere with Medical School Grading Systems (Source: STAT)
- Changing the Story on Health and Racial Equity: Why Public Health Needs an Infrastructure for Building Narrative Power (Source: Milbank)
- Brown to Fund Grad Students Who Lost Grants (Source: Inside Higher Ed)
- Winning Coalitions Have the Right Kinds of Differences (Source: Convergence Magazine)
- Executive Orders Affecting LGBTQ+ Communities: FAQs (Source: ACT for Public Health)
We transform health professions education by mobilizing and amplifying learners, teachers, community leaders, policymakers, and their organizations to advance equity in education, research, service, policy, and practice.
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